'Ant from Mars' might help clarify evolution of species

A pale, eyeless ant found in a Brazilian rain forest might hold a key to further understanding the evolution of ants.

A pale, eyeless ant found in a Brazilian rain forest might hold a key to further understanding the evolution of ants.

The unusual creature was moving in front of Christian Rabeling, a myrmecologist (or, as he puts it, "ant nerd"), as he packed up his equipment one night.

"I said, 'Oh -- that looks weird!' So I picked it up and threw it in a vial," Rabeling said.

The specimen, it turns out, is thought to be of the world's most primitive living ant. Last week, Rabeling and his colleagues reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that it was the first discovery of a new living ant subfamily in 85 years.

Stefan Cover, a curatorial assistant at the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Mass., said he asked famed entomologist and emeritus Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson to have a look at Rabeling's photo of the creature.

"Ed comes running over and says, 'Oh my God, this looks like an ant from Mars!' " Cover said.

That led Rabeling, who is now a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, to name the ant Martialis heureka, or "the ant from Mars -- eureka!"

The ant split off from the rest of the ant family about the time of the dinosaurs. It also defies scientists' expectations. Because ants are descendants of wasps, scientists expected a primitive ant to be wasplike, not to lack eyes and live underground like this one.

The discovery also is a happy ending to an unfinished quest. Manfred Verhaagh, co-author of the paper and a biologist with the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, discovered two of the ants five years earlier, but the specimens were accidentally destroyed.